Oil spills result in serious damage to the environment. The primary tools used to respond to oil spills are mechanical containment, recovery, and cleanup equipment. Such equipment includes a variety of booms, barriers, and skimmers (see, e.g. Oil Spill Science and Technology: Prevention, Response, and Cleanup. 2010, Ed. Mervin Fingas, Elsevier).
One of the most important tools for oil spill response is the skimmer, which recovers oil from the water surface. Of the three main types—weir, oleophilic, and suction—the suction skimmer is generally the most efficient.
The suction skimmer operates like a household vacuum cleaner. Oil is sucked up through floating heads and pumped into storage tanks. Depending on the oil content and its condition, the oily waste water is further treated to separate the oil and water, and then the recovered materials recycled or sent to an approved facility for disposal.
One approach to treat the recovered oily waste water is an oil-separator system such as gravity settling tanks in which the lighter oil gradually floats to the top. A large variety of gravity settling tanks have been developed, including horizontal and vertical two- and three-phase separators, as well as central inlet and central outlet separators.
The settling tanks or gravity separators are sometimes incorporated into skimmers. However, they are more often installed on shore or recovery ships or barges due to the their size and need to process massive volumes of water initially recovered along with the oil from the contaminated water's surface. Another reason is that they require stable platforms to limit movement and avoid remixing of the oil and water phases.
Yet the majority of the oil is still left behind in the environment due in large part to the limitations of the existing skimmers used for initial response. One of the major challenges is that skimmers tend to recover more water than oil, especially when rocking in choppy waters. Other disadvantages with skimmers are their vulnerability to clogging with debris and restriction of access to areas often most impacted by spills, such as tidal or shoreline areas.
These and other drawbacks have left large gaps in effective oil spill response.
There is a clear need for improved oil-water separators, systems and methods, as well as products and methods for recovering oil and other lighter-than water contaminants from water. A particular need exists for oil-water separators in rapid response oil recovery systems, which should be compact, simple to deploy, and process large volume flow rates among other things while avoiding unwanted co-recovery of too much water when cleaning up oil spills in multiple different environments. The present disclosure addresses these and other needs.